


I Wanna Show Our Girl The Universe

by SunsetOfDoom



Category: Guardians of the Galaxy (Movies)
Genre: Curtain Fic, Domestic, Found Family, Gen, Humor, Kid Fic, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-01
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-24 04:26:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,679
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6141450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunsetOfDoom/pseuds/SunsetOfDoom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peter Quill forgot to use a space condom. And now he's attached to the unholy screaming mess. His friends are not amused.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Just so everyone knows, the working title for this was "Peter Quill Accidentally A Baby" before I re-read Saga and found the title quote.
> 
> I have spent entirely too much time on Parents.com for this fic. If anyone has actual baby stories, please share them in the comments, because if I read one more article about "when will my precious cooing cloud-puff bundle of joy start to (standard infant milestone)?" I am going to scream.
> 
> All my love to Jewel for their many, many contributions and continuous encouragement.

Gamora has only been gone for three days. She cannot possibly hear a crying baby inside the darkened Milano. It is entirely impossible that Quill has gotten himself in this much trouble.

 

(It is, in fact, depressingly possible, as Quill is unbelievably danger-prone, finding himself almost magnetized to the most enormous disasters Gamora has ever seen- and she has seen some disasters. But for her own health she chooses to face new developments of his idiocy with simple disbelief, in case they go away.)

 

The doorway unlatches itself at her code, and the hall is worryingly silent, the lights on but at their lowest possible setting. Everything is as it was left before they went their separate ways; her spare knives settled around the reclining chair she has claimed as hers, Rocket’s box of spare parts and unfinished explosives tucked less-than-carefully away, Groot’s outgrown pot filled with emergency cuttings, flowers, and fertilizer stowed in the corner.

 

Her training takes over, and she hugs the wall, unsheathing a knife as she moves towards the stairs. The only sound is the soft hum of the lights. No music, the tape deck silent and still.

 

A loud, animal wail splits the air, and Gamora nearly drops her knife. She hurtles up the stairs, sprinting towards the console, and grabs a corner of the seat to swing herself around.

 

Sitting there, frantically shushing and rocking the screaming blanket bundle in his arms, is Peter; untrimmed and bleary-eyed, he looks like he hasn’t slept since she’s been gone.

 

“Oh, hey!” He smiles, too wide, in a way that throws the dark circles under his eyes into sharp relief. “How was your weekend?”

 

“What is that?” She hisses.

 

“Straight to the point, yeah? No, ‘It was great, thanks Peter! I stabbed some bastards and got the knifing-people impulse out of my system’?” The baby’s cries begin to quiet, and he makes an attempt at soothing, cooing noises at it until it starts to screech again. “You could at least say hello.”

 

“Who trusted you with an infant?” She asks, resisting the urge to cover her ears. “Who could possibly be stupid enough to think you could-”

 

“It’s mine.”

 

Several possible responses flit through Gamora’s mind. “That’s impossible” is dismissed, as are the definitive “Absolutely not” and “You’re an idiot”. None of them are helpful.

 

She watches him try haplessly to console the child, and finally settles on, “With whom?”

 

“Do you remember the Krylorian girl I was hanging around for a while? Adaria? The biologist? With the terrible band shirts, and the really soft-” he pauses, glancing at the innocent in his arms, and finishes with, “-hair?”

 

Gamora does remember this girl, though ‘woman’ would be the better word. Gamora’s height with none of her muscle mass, pink-skinned and blue-eyed, with a gaptoothed smile and a rotating wardrobe of ripped concert shirts. She hung on for almost two weeks, the longest she has seen anyone manage to sleep with Quill and not try to murder him.

 

“Turns out she wasn’t all Krylorian. Something in her genetic makeup was either Terran, or...” He shrugs. “Whatever the hell else I’m half of, and it...” He waves one hand towards the infant.

 

The baby begins to settle, and he sighs, “thank-” before it shrieks anew. He groans, and buries his face in the thin purple blanket.

 

The door whiirs open, and Rocket’s voice echoes through the ship. “Holy shit, who’s getting murdered?”

 

“Up here!” Gamora calls.

 

He bounds up the stairs, moving on all fours as he only does in emergencies, and skids to a halt when he sees the blanket.

 

“What the fuck is that?!” The baby pauses for breath, and releases the loudest scream yet; Rocket yelps, covering his ears.

 

“Will you please shut up?” Quill whispers to his friends, patting the blanket clumsily.

 

Rocket points at their officially-insane friend, helplessly confused. She digs her hands into her hair; the noise is giving her a headache. “Quill slept with someone he shouldn’t have.”

 

His eyes widen almost comically. “Are you-” he gestures wildly, occasionally returning his hands to his ears when the baby’s cries get louder, “What the-”. He false-starts a few more times, eventually giving up and staring in disbelief.

 

Gamora moves for the medicine cabinet. “My head hurts.”

 

“I’m sorry, have you been living with this for the last twenty hours?” Peter stage-whispers after her. She ignores him.

 

While rustling through the drugs, trying to find something strong enough to cope with an inconsolable infant, she hears the door open again, and the loud, clomping footsteps that indicate Groot’s arrival.

 

She doesn’t look forward to explaining this situation again. Why is it that the only one of them who has parental experience is the last to get back?

 

Reluctantly, she returns to the source of the noise. Groot, Rocket, and Peter are deep in a strangely serious conversation on how to stop the cacophony, occasionally pausing or repeating themselves over the baby’s cries.

 

“Turned the music on?”

 

“Tried that.”

 

“Walked around?”

 

“Yep.” 

 

" _I am Groot_?"

 

“That too.”

 

Peter curses, bouncing the child up and down. The constant wail ululates, but doesn’t cease.

 

A bald blue head rises from the staircase. Drax walks in slowly, a solemn frown on his face and pain in his eyes.

 

Gamora immediately regrets wishing for his presence.

 

“Is that an infant?” He asks. As if in answer, the baby screams with all its breath.

 

“Yes! Yes it is! How do we make it stop?” Peter shouts. “Shh, shh, please don’t cry...”

 

Drax comes up behind the new father, gingerly touching the thin blanket.

 

“Boy? Or girl?”

 

“Girl, I think. Adaria didn’t name her, though.”

 

With the uncertainty of a long-unpracticed task, Drax lifts the child, holding her close to his body. Peter practically collapses with relief.

 

“When was her last feeding?”

 

An awkward silence descends. Peter averts his eyes, grimacing, and lowers his face to his hands, while Rocket whacks himself in the forehead. Groot murmurs, "Oh."

 

Drax, with an expression of awful, re-awakened grief, hands the baby off to Gamora, who doesn’t quite know what to do with her, but doesn’t know how to refuse her, either. She tucks the still-crying thing awkwardly into the crook of her arm, looking down to find a tiny version of Quill’s bright blue eyes staring back at her. They maintain eye contact for a moment, and then her tiny pink face screws up as her mouth opens wide for another yell.

 

“I will purchase infant formula.” Drax retreats down the stairs, his shoulders low and his head bowed.

 

“She’s mostly Krylorian. Find something for that.” Peter says, slightly muffled by his having his head between his knees.

 

 

Silence descends on everyone but the wailing child. Gamora is afraid to move, almost afraid to breathe, with the tiny, breakable infant in her arms; Peter sighs, his hands clasped behind his head. Rocket perches on Groot’s shoulder, and they communicate in flickering glances.

 

A hysterical giggle emerges from Quill. “Hey, Gamora, at least now you won’t be the only girl.”

 

She starts, and checks the baby, shifting her against her breast in a way that feels a little more secure. “What makes you think we are keeping this child?”

 

“Her mom can’t take care of her.” He moves like a marionette with only one string, but he levers himself up until he’s resting his elbows on his knees.

 

“In what universe is anyone less capable of taking a child than Peter Quill?”

 

“Adaria’s working two jobs to put herself through school. She barely has enough money to keep the lights on. She’s too stressed to produce milk and can’t feed the thing. I spent three hours listening to her goddamn sob story, trying to talk her out of leaving it here, but...” He shrugs, helpless. “She _cried_ , man. I couldn’t say no.”

 

“I am _Groot_.”

 

“Nah, we can totally call her an it. Look at it, that brain’s probably about the consistency of old oatmeal. I’m pretty sure you have to be able to talk before you earn a pronoun.”

 

Gamora almost moves to rub her fading headache away, but remembers the baby in her arms at the last moment. “Pronouns are not the issue here. The _helpless infant_ is. How are you expecting to take care of this?”

“Well, see, the old-fashioned way involves a sack, and the river.”

 

Groot’s jaw drops, and Peter glares fiercely; Rocket just laughs.

 

There are not enough pain pills in the world for this. “Rocket, you’re not funny.”

 

“Yes I am.”

 

“Do you want it?” She moves the infant to the crook of her arm again, offering it to him. Rocket recoils, moving to Groot’s other shoulder to hide behind his head. “Hey, don’t look at me, that thing probably has diseases.”

 

She moves the tiny girl back upwards, letting her rest her tiny chin on the shoulder of her leather jacket. “Next time you make a crack like that I’m making you hold her.”

 

“That’s extortion or something. Gotta be illegal.”

 

“So is _drowning babies_!” Peter puts in.

“Peter!” He turns his attention away from the tiny cyborg threatening his firstborn, and, hopefully, back to the real problem. “How are we going to keep her fed?”

 

“We have money, we have jobs, we have time! More than Adaria does, at least!”

 

“None of us know how to take care of a child!”

 

“Drax does!”

 

“One out of five is pretty crappy, Peter.” Rocket puts in.

 

Peter buries his face in his hands again. “I know. I know it seems like none of us can raise a kid, I know our jobs are weird and stressful and super-dangerous, I know how incredibly screwed up we all are.” He looks up. “Well, except for Groot.”

 

Groot nods at him, and shrugs. “I am Groot.”

 

“Again, _not the point_.” Gamora reminds them.

 

“But I don’t want to just drop _my child_ off somewhere and hope that they’re good people!” He looks around at all of them, his expression desperate and slightly manic. “At least if we raise her, she’ll know she’s surrounded by people who care about her, people who would protect her, people who would, I don't know, blow up moons for her.”

“Gonna be honest, I’d blow up moons for pretty much any reason.”

 

“Rocket...”

 

“I am not joking at all.”

 

“My _point is_ ,” Peter continues loudly, “I know a majority of us had deeply shitty upbringings, but this is our chance to be better, right? We can learn. We can try. And has anybody else realized that she stopped crying a while ago? ‘Cause I’m really enjoying that.”

 

Gamora blinks. The child’s noise had gotten softer and softer as they argued, and it- she- was now hiccuping into Gamora’s shoulder. An awed silence falls onto them like drifting snow, the four former outlaws captivated by the child’s quiet breathing.

 

“What do we call her?” Rocket asks.

 

They stare around at each other, none willing to suggest a name. Gamora closes her eyes, counting to ten and controlling her temper.

 

“We should find her a place to stay.”

 

“Yeah, _here_.” Peter states, unmovable.

 

“In case we’re in danger, have you thought of that? If-” she bites back on the words _my father_ \- “anyone comes after us, or we need to fight. She will need somewhere else to be. I say that takes precedence over her naming.”

 

Peter nods. “Okay. I’ll take that.” He looks to the child in her arms. “Now gimme my kid, I can’t believe you got her to stop crying before I did. Seriously?”

 

“Fine by me.”

 

Gamora moves forward, ready to pass the child back to her blood kin, and the second she moves, the girl wakes, takes a deep breath in, and begins to cry again.

 

The deep sigh echoes around the room.

 

“Why is it always you that talks us into doing the stupid nice-people bullshit, Quill?” Rocket wonders aloud, dismounting from Groot’s shoulder.

 

“Because I’m the only one of us with a functional moral compass.” Peter grumbles, rocking his baby back and forth.

 

They each retreat to their own corners of the ship; in four years, they've claimed their own spaces, marked their living patterns into the ship with a steady, comforting habit. Gamora has her armchair, found at a junk sale after a job; old and musty, but soft, lived-in, covered with a thick knitted blanket that wrinkles into a nest while she sleeps.

 

She drops into it, picking up a knife to sharpen, the chore familiar and soothing. Over the baby's muffled crying she can hear Rocket tinkering with something; he swears at it, but she's attuned to all of their rhythms by now and she can hear his breath slowing, feel the anxiety of a disrupted routine fade. Groot is humming contentedly, twining vines up to the lights.

 

It's almost easy, to think of raising a child here. Sitting in this chair to feed her, or listening to Rocket explain a mechanism or Groot singing to her; watching Peter twirl her around to his music. All of them together teaching her to walk, to speak, to read.

 

And, she reminds herself, to fight. None of them are without enemies. It would be foolish to think the girl could ever be safe.

 

From upstairs she can hear the little girl, no longer screaming, but sobbing, a sound that could almost be sweet if it weren’t heartbreaking. And Peter's off-key voice, warbling to his child.

 

" _Ooo-ooh, child, things are gonna get easier..._ " He yawns mid-lyric. " _Ooo-ooh, child, things will get brighter..._ "

 

She supposes that if it could save a planet, this song might stand a chance at putting Quill’s baby to sleep.

 

The door beeps lightly; the code outside is entered, and it opens to reveal Drax, a bag carried over his shoulder. He nods to Gamora, his eyes troubled, and heads upstairs for the infant and her incompetent father.

 

After a moment's thought, Gamora follows.

 

She enters to find Peter dozing on the chair, the child still whining in his ear. She wonders how long he's been awake; her observations have been that after twenty hours without sleep, he begins to lose coherency.

 

Ever since she had witnessed him in _that_ undignified state she and Groot have taken it upon themselves to shepherd Quill to a place where he can sleep at least once a day.

 

If she wakes him now, she will have to take the infant; Drax cannot seem to look at her for long, Rocket is as cautious of her as most people should be of explosives, and she is unsure if Groot realizes how fragile mammalian young are. Gamora would like to think that she is less frightened of holding a baby than she is of facing trained soldiers in battle. She would like to, but the child is breakable, and she is a murderer.

 

But she is also a Guardian- she cannot believe how well the name has stuck- and she can face things that scare her, for the sake of her found family.

 

So she lays a hand on Peter’s arm, watching his bright eyes snap open and look over her, and to his infant daughter.

 

“You ought to have proper sleep.” She states. Flat logic will inspire the least neurotic, exhausted babbling from Quill. He nods as he tries to stretch without moving the baby at all.

 

“Really though,” he stage-whispers- the baby pays no heed to his attempt at quiet and raises the tone of her crying- “she should have a name.”

 

Gamora watches the child squirm, trying to collect her thoughts into words.

 

It is to Quill that she talks of the Zehoberei; Rocket, with no people to call his own but them, would not care; Drax, who left his homeworld behind long ago, would not understand; Groot, whose disconnect from his species is of his own choice, would not respond.

 

Peter is the one who hears of her foggy memories and vague recollections, and in return he tells her half-remembered Terran stories. 

 

“When I was small-” Peter’s eyes focus in on her; this is how she begins to speak of her home planet, without tainting it of the events that came after. “-my mother had another child. A boy. Undersized.” She remembers the day of his birth, trying to worm her way through the throng of people around the bed to see her mother. “Our people did not name children until they took their first steps. A holdover, I think, from a time when death in infancy was common.”

 

Peter waits for her to continue, but she cannot find a way to tell him that her brother was only learning to crawl when Thanos came. That he had been dead in front of her while Thanos-

 

She tries to focus on the living child before her, and not the long-dead one swimming before her eyes.

 

“Well, I’m all for procrastination.” He reaches a hand up to pet the girl’s hair, but stops as an enormous yawn shakes his frame. “Speaking of, I kinda do need sleep. Drax is down in the pantry trying to get the formula thingamajig to work- please feed her so she’ll shut up.”

 

She nods, lifting the baby where she thinks her underarms are; the infant’s head rolls alarmingly, and Gamora settles her against her body, trying to keep her steady and safe.

 

“Also, can I have a hand up? I can’t feel my legs.”

 

 

Once Peter has been persuaded into bed, and Drax distracted by his books, she feeds the infant in her armchair with the blanket thrown over her bare feet. The babe rests her head on Gamora’s breasts, whining between sucking breaths and sucking formula.

 

There is a careful scratching at the back of the chair before Rocket pops his head up over the armrest- he knows how she reacts to surprises.

 

“Hey,” he says softly, eyeing the infant as though she might explode, “I don’t think you oughta be feeding her this long?”

 

She raises an eyebrow at him. “Do you remember what she was doing with her mouth before I put this in it?”

 

“Yeah, but if she hasn’t eaten in, what, a couple days? That’s a lot for a little thing.”

 

“Yes, so I am feeding her. To make up for the last few days.”

 

He looks at her as though she is from a different galaxy than the one he is familiar with. “You know if you feed her too much too fast she’ll spew it all up, right?”

 

“I have heard that babies do that naturally.”

 

“No, but, like-” he struggles for a moment. “Ain’t you ever been starvin’ before?”

 

Her heart jumps into her throat, looking into her friend’s eyes and knowing that she hasn’t, and he has. More than any of the others, Rocket has understood her- the way she startles upon being touched, or hates to be restrained. Likewise, she has compared her lightweight, well-crafted artificial skeleton to his haphazard metal implants, and known that he, too, has nightmares of being ripped apart at the seams.

 

It is no surprise to know they have had different experiences, but it grieves her, a little, to know that this is one pain he has suffered which she has not.

 

“It is of no use to starve a weapon.” She states. “It would only have made me slow.” Pain had been a much better motivator.

 

He grumbles to himself, his eyes darting back and forth uncomfortably. “If’n you don’t eat for too long, your stomach gets smaller and too much food makes you throw up. Now stop feeding the thing before it blows up, yeah?” He dislodges himself from the side of her chair and returns to his corner, next to Groot’s sunlamps.

 

The baby murmurs a little as Gamora withdraws the bottle from her mouth, but doesn’t return to her yelling. Instead, she shifts her tiny arms inside the well-rolled blanket, lolls her head into Gamora’s breast, and yawns.

 

Rest sounds just as good to Gamora. She nudges herself downwards to rest her head, draws her knees up close to the baby’s feet, and closes her eyes.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here's the thing. We're rapidly approaching the end of what I have written; from then my update speed mostly depends on when I'm procrastinating writing my Star Wars stuff. (Which is literally all the time.)
> 
> As always, please leave me funny baby stories in the comments, and I'll try to work them in somehow!

She dozes, as is all her body needs, listening to the baby cry softly or murmur in her sleep. The infant also expels gas like an engine overflow pump, but Gamora’s modified filtration system takes the vaguely toxic chemicals from the air upon inhalation. The lights are low, the sensors of the Milano detecting slowed life signs in a majority of her crew, and she listens to Rocket’s soft, whistling breath, the quiet stretch of Groot’s leaves. Drax is snoring on his cot in the pantry.

The child stirs within a few hours, whining in some kind of need, and Gamora, rationalizing that her shift is now over, takes the half-empty formula bottle in one hand while balancing the infant against her chest. She levers herself out of the chair, going to find either Quill or Drax. 

From the dining-room, she hears voices, and goes to investigate, cupping the back of the girl’s head until she quiets her noises.

“C’mon, man.” She hears Peter say, plaintive. On the other line, she only hears sounds of laughter.

“Really? Dude, I am in very serious need here. This is a serious situation.”

Vague sounds that might be words come through the hooting laughter, but it soon descends into chaos again. She shoulders the door open, and finds Quill looking deeply unamused, while Denarian Dey laughs himself to tears on the vid-screen.

Peter hears the door open, and buries his head in his hands. 

Dey looks up into the camera as she moves into its range, and she nods in greeting.

“Oh, hey Gamora!” He’s still chuckling as he talks, but he wipes his hands over his eyes and is ready, at least, for intelligible speech. “Peter was just telling me- oh, wow, is that the kid?”

As if in answer, the girl breaks her silence with a long cry. Gamora sighs, rocking on her heels to bounce the child up and down, and the wail tapers off.

“Oh, yeah, I remember those days.” Dey smiles, with great compassion. “What’s her name?”

“She doesn’t have one yet.” Gamora says, perhaps more with more force than is necessary. 

He puts his hands up, a gesture of surrender. “Hey, that’s fine. Do you know how long it took Shia and I to name Korey? We argued for weeks. However long it takes you.”

“S’a tradition.” Peter explains, head still in his hands. “No name until they start walking.”

Grateful for her friend’s discretion, she changes the subject. “You are not in uniform?”

Dey grins. “No, I am not.” He is instead in a worn sleep-shirt, his hair sticking up in odd places. “Day off.”

Gamora wonders, then, why he is talking to them, but she is interrupted by a tiny head of hair appearing onscreen, and a small, pink hand, waving hello.

Korey enters the screen gradually as her father picks her up. “Oof,” he groans, “Kay, you’re getting too big for this.”

“Nuh-uh!” She argues. He kisses her on the nose, and as she giggles, jostles her softly. “Manners, Kay, say hello.”

“Hi!” She says, brightly. “Is Rocket there?”

Gamora snorts. “He is still sleeping, young one.”

Korey’s face falls. She had taken a liking to Rocket after he tinkered with one of her toys and made it a little more... lively. (According to her father, three of her classmates had gotten minor electrical shocks before the toy gun had been confiscated.) “Aww. But good morning, Gamora! What is it that you are holding?”

“They have a _baby_ now, sweetheart.” Dey tells her, condescending to both his daughter and Peter, who glares. “And she needs some of your old clothes and bottles.”

The little girl contemplates this for a moment, and then nods. “That’s all right. I don’t use them anymore except on my dolls.”

“And maybe some of your toys.” He pokes her nose. “Or _all_ of your toys...”

“No!” She squeals.

“Can you give us the name of a doctor?” Gamora puts in. “She may need... shots?” She guesses at this.

Dey smiles. “You’ve got no experience with kids either, huh? I’ve got the pediatrician’s contact number somewhere- hey Shia?” He raises his voice to be heard in the other room. “Shia, can you find Doc Fee’s contact for me?”

“Hey, uh.” Peter interjects awkwardly, “Is there a, like, halfway house or something around there? Like, daycare, or a convenient friendly orphanage? It’s just, if, say, Thanos or somebody were to come looking for us, we wouldn’t want her caught in any crossfires.”

For the first time, Dey looks honestly concerned. “Someplace to leave her, you mean?”

“No! I mean, not right now, and not forever, but... for a while. On standby. We live dangerous lives, y’know?”

“Well, I’ll ask around, there’s probably something, babysitters are a dime a dozen.” Dey sets his daughter down when she starts to wiggle, and she runs into the background, her dolls spread out on the carpet. “But I mean, is there a reason you’re not just going to adopt her out?”

“Yeah, because I grew up without any family and it you know what? It sucked.” Peter seems a little too close to real anger, and she takes action, slipping the child into his arms.

He looks up at her, then down at the baby, surprised by her sudden appearance. They stare at each other for a moment, identical wide blue eyes framed by tall brows arched in surprise. 

And then Peter wrinkles his nose. “Ew. She smells.”

“It must be genetic.” Gamora comments, which earns her a surreptitious raised middle finger as he adjusts the baby blanket.

Dey starts to laugh again. “Oh man. Space-lord needs to learn to change a diaper.” 

With nothing more than a grimace at ‘space-lord’,-which, truth be told, had rapidly become an affectionate nickname from their Nova liaison - Peter takes a relatively discreet sniff at the infant’s lower region.

He jolts back, his face contorting, and the family- Shia, too, passing by in the background- cackles at his plight.

Peter turns his best ‘helpless’ face on Gamora, and she decides that as much as she is willing to do for her family, diaper changing crosses a line.

“I believe that is her father’s duty.” She tells him on her way out the door, and exits to Peter’s infuriated sputtering.

 

She spends the next few hours reading and not listening to Drax, Peter, and the baby as they go about the laborious process of cleaning her mess. Instead she pays attention to Groot, who, as he sometimes does when pleased, hums a low, even-toned song. To her ears it sounds like a singular note, but somewhere in her mind, in the same place that begins to understand Groot’s true words, the melody soars in harmonies she can barely comprehend.

The seven-day trip to Xandar passes much the same: taking the infant to feed her, burp her, or simply allow her to fall asleep on her body, and pointedly allowing the diaper business to pass her by without involvement. After his wariness the first night, Rocket seems determined to ignore the hairless screaming thing, and goes about his tinkering, bomb-building and varied activities without a word about her.

Groot appreciates seeing the child, but he tells Gamora he would rather not handle her until she is less fragile, which she understands. But he lets his leaves grow long, allowing them to make a soft rustling noise when he sways which the infant likes immensely. Well, she stops her crying to listen; she has not smiled yet.  
Xandar is as beautiful, and as irritating, as she remembers. They have not been back in over a year- after their defeat of Ronan, they have a tendency to get mobbed- but she will agree with Rocket's assessment of, "they got no idea what the word 'defensible' means, do they?". The capital city is ill-designed, shining, and ostentatious, and the people are pretentious and snooty. 

Groot, with Rocket perched on his shoulder, splits off from the rest and allows a crowd to recognize them; within minutes, he's picking his way through a legion of excited civilians. The rest of them sneak past, with varying degrees of success. (Drax, draped in an enormous grey cloak, moves so conspicuously she is surprised that he cannot be seen from off-planet.)

Dey's place of residence is close to Nova headquarters, but they take a roundabout route, avoiding the worst of the crowds that have now been alerted to their arrival. The residences they pass are older, a little contradictory to Xandar's shiny utopian aesthetic, but not unclean; and the people on the street are fewer, more tired than the effervescent congregations in the middle city.

It takes an hour to meander their way to the back of Dey's tall apartment building, where Shia is waiting in the broad herbal garden to let them inside.

Upstairs, Dey- ("call me Rhom, please, I'm off-duty)- has boxes stacked already, filled to the brim with bottles, toys, and clothes, and a small basket-crib piled with blankets.

Gamora raises her eyebrows at the pile, and Shia catches her look. "We had most of it in storage." She explains. "My husband has a tendency not to throw anything away." She eyes the husband in question, and though she seems mildly irritated, there is love also in her glance. “I had to persuade him to only keep this much- these were just Korey’s favourites.”

Shia turns. "Dear? Can you help them load these up? I need to let the others in before the mob finds us." She pats her husband on the arm, and turns to go- but he catches her by the wrist, pulling her in for a kiss before he lets her through the doorway.

By the table on the opposite wall, she sees Drax cover his eyes with a hand.

"So uh," Peter interjects, "how are we going to get this to the ship without everybody and their mother asking about this one?" He bounces the sleeping baby, prompting her to burp loudly.

Dey smiles. "Oh, you'll like this."

From the cant of his grin, Gamora can guess that they will not.

 

Twenty minutes later, there is a Corpsman at her back, only pretending to hold her unattached arm cuffs in place as she walks, and she is torn between despising and admiring Denarian Dey. 

He is at the front of their motley crew, holding their “ringleader” in a kind of gentle headlock while Peter keeps up a steady mantra of “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you...”, and Dey projects his voice in a fatherly, lecturing monologue for all to hear.

“You know, I wouldn’t presume to accuse the _heroes_ here of doing anything immoral, but the fact remains that this kind of trading is in a bit of a grey area, and I’m sorry, but you need to know that it really can’t be tolerated more than once.”

Gamora rolls her eyes, her head high despite the crowd of snickering onlookers.

Thankfully, they are almost to the ship, where a pile of heavily fortified crates is being loaded off of a hovering platform.

“Sorry, Ma’am,” says the fresh-faced Aakon Corpsman, as he takes the arm cuffs back. She bares her teeth at him, and he jumps, scurrying away.

 

The three of them are greeted by Rocket, who is snickering, and Groot, plucking his leaves worriedly.

“Yeah, we loaded this stuff up pretty fast. And then got to hang around drinking spiked pritchardine with Shia and watching you morons get frog-marched through half the city.” He grins, hopping down from the table. “She fed the baby again before she left, and left a message here- some kind of Krylorian baby manual.” He gestures into the dining room with the communications console, and leans a shoulder against the boxes, now brought indoors. “At least one of these crates is empty, brought it here for show. But it’s nice wood, pretty sure we can sell it somewhere. The rest is for the kid.”

Groot makes a discontented noise, glancing sideways at the wood planks that make up the crates.

“I know, man, but it’s dead already, and it wasn’t sentient to start with. Life goes on.”

Gamora sits cross-legged to pry the nails out of the crates; she could use a magnet to get them out, the way Rocket does on her right, but she finds the small physical task soothing after a day of stress. Groot grumbles in their general direction, pointedly not looking at the wooden slats. Drax opens the hatch down to the bedroom, formula bottle in hand, and Peter starts up Shia’s message in the dining room.

She tracks them all in her head, their small movements about the ship, four safe and well. One to go, though she is probably where she was left.

A shrill cry comes from the bedroom as Drax deactivates the soundproofing cube over the baby’s laundry-basket bed. Gamora smiles.

All present and accounted for.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> OK: Something I just made up: Krylorian babies mature faster physically than humans, but slower mentally. So she'll be lifting her head before smiling, walking before talking. It evens out in toddlerhood, but I figured she should be, well, at least a little alien.

It takes two days before they hear back from Shia, during which they have unpacked one box, dealt with an exploding diaper, and narrowly avoided coming to blows over the correct way to set up the crib. Relatively, a calm and restful period.

They all pile into the dining room, slowly shifting from Xandarian time to their varying space-optimal sleep patterns. Rocket hums in the pantry, cobbling together some manner of protein mash and sugared starch product to make his meal. Drax has the baby, waggling a finger in front of her eyes to watch her track it back and forth, though from the lines around his eyes- and the crying she's been listening to for two hours- indicate that it is near her shift.

Peter touches the screen to open the pre-recorded message of Shia standing in her living room one early morning. "Hello! I took a scan of the child as you asked, and forwarded it to Korey's pediatrician, Doctor Vedla Fiori. She and I met when we left Krylor on the same ship; you can trust her as well as you do myself. I've told her to expect a call, as I assumed you would rather your information be kept private as much as possible." 

Shia types something into the holo-keys and a small link pops up on the screen, a picture of a Krylorian woman in a lab-coat. "And Rocket, Korey would like me to tell you that you are her favourite. Starlight go with you all." She waves good-bye as the message cuts.

"Hey Rocket?" Peter calls.

"Yeah?"

"Korey says you're her favourite."

"I'm everybody's favourite, Quill."

Quill does a vastly unpleasant action with his tongue that he has described as “blowing a raspberry". (Which she finds odd, as this has nothing to do with the song on his tape marked “the raspberries”.)

The baby whines, and Gamora decides to take her. She lifts the small girl up high in the air, which cuts the crying off, and she replaces it with a long, fascinated coo. Her tiny, chubby pink arms wave in the air, and Gamora lowers her slowly to look her straight in the eye.

“Aah.” She says, placing her hands on Gamora’s cheeks. It’s very sweet, until she pulls her fingers inward to grab and rakes her needle-like nails across Gamora’s face.

 

She takes hold of the child’s arms, resolving to find some kind of covering for her nails; now that she looks, the babe has small red scratch marks on her face, tiny dots of red blood beading on the deep pink skin. Which would explain her frantic, disturbed crying. Gamora murmurs to her in sympathy as her rapid-healing system fixes the tiny injuries of her own face, the minute sting of applying fake skin cells almost unnoticeable.

“Are you going to call now or later?” She asks Peter, who is sitting on the table (again) and fiddling with the screen’s interface.

He shrugs. “Now? Probably after everybody’s done eating though. Medical talk grossness and all.”

Rocket, preoccupied with his food, gives Peter a two-fingered salute in thanks.

Gamora shifts the girl so she rests her chin on her shoulder; her leather jacket is already so scorched, torn, and encrusted with dirt that infant spittle will make no difference. With one hand free, she heads for the pantry to get antiseptic cream and stick-on bandage patches.

As she spreads a blanket out on the table to begin her patchwork doctoring, Peter calls the actual doctor. Fiori's colleagues take down their information, and although her back is to the screen Gamora can hear their excited half-giggles, and she grits her teeth, dabbing at the baby's face with a wet cloth. Across the table she sees Rocket's ears twitch as the girl screams.

"Doctor Vedla Fiori, may I ask who is calling?"

"Hey!" Peter says brightly, his talking-to-marks voice as irritating as she remembers it to be. "We were referenced to you by Shia Dey, did she tell you-"

"Oh!" Her gasp cuts him off. "You all have the unexpected baby, right? Shia gave me her scans, and she really has the most interesting genetic lineup. Are... any of you the biological parents?"

"Just me." Says Peter, and Gamora's work is interrupted by Drax, re-entering the room with a pair of tiny green baby socks in hand. He leans over her to slide them over the infant's hands, and pets the top of her head until her something-is-hurting-me screeches slow to simple crying.

Peter turns to give them an unsubtle thumbs-up, and an incomprehensible waving gesture that might mean 'take her out of here', and also might mean 'make her be quiet', or any number of other suggestions, before turning back to his conversation.

"Well, like Shia said, her most prominent species alignment is Krylorian, more specifically Darzi-Krylorian, which means her eye sockets are larger and she may have some sight issues later in life, and also dictates her vaccinations. But the rest of her makeup is deeply..." She pauses, searching for an inoffensive word, and settles on, "-varied." 

Peter nods. "I'm half Terran, and the other half I'm not so sure about."

"Really! Terran isn't in our database- that explains some things. But the other species I could find on her genetic line are planet-side Krylorian, Dire Wraith, and White Kree, along with some deeply strange anomalies I've never seen before."

"The anomalies are probably my not-so-sure half." Peter reassures her. 

"Oh, well, at least we know where they came from now." She laughs. "She's fairly healthy, but she does need her vaccinations, and a physical just to be on the safe side. When's the next time you'll be on Xandar?"

Peter makes a noncommittal noise, turning to Gamora as she applies the last adhesive to the baby. "Don't look at me. I am not flying there."

"Let's give it a few weeks. At least."

"All right; I've got a few open spots, I'll put you down for a time and as we get closer to it we can reschedule."

Gamora lets the baby grab at her fingers while Peter bargains a time further and further away, avoiding a trip back to Xandar until absolutely necessary.

"And one more thing- if you aren't planning to make planet fall at all, you need let her move a little more than a planet side baby would. If you just let her kick in her playpen for, say, an hour a day, she should be alright. It's just that artificial gravity can have some negative effects on skeleto-muscular development, especially in infancy."

Peter turns to her. "Can you help with that? I know I won't remember."

Gamora sighs, hoists the baby up, and goes to find her collapsible play-pen. 

 

"How much of this does he really think we need?" She asks in exasperation, kicking a stuffed toy out of the pile. The crates are dismantled, and everything is splayed out on the floor, no one having the inclination to find somewhere on their already-crowded ship to put tiny musical instruments and puzzle games. Gamora has found the playpen, a soft blue collapsed square in the middle of the pile. It is now a question of untangling it from various other toys.

Drax cocks his head. "It was my understanding that the unwanted toys would be sold to allow us flexibility in employment."

Gamora had not considered this. "Why would they give us these things if not for the baby?"

"Shia made it pretty clear that she was gonna throw this crap out anyways." Rocket puts in. "Tired of paying for storage."

She considers this. Shia is a kind, but practical, woman, and it makes sense for her to foist her daughter’s old things on them instead of bothering with charities. Why, then, is she so wary of this?

She thinks on it as she wades into the pile and gets her hand on the folded fabric. Shia is their friend, and Gamora does trust her, insofar as she trusts anyone. She struggles to get the pen to unfold correctly. 

What she doesn't trust, she realizes, is the idea of charity. Of having to depend on put-away funds and a few boxes of toys to keep them fed and fueled until- when exactly? Until the girl could walk, her name-day? Until they could find her a surrogate family, to take care of her while her parents run off to blow up space stations and Skrull outposts?

Parents. The word makes her feel deeply nervous. She's a parent.

"Peter!" She yells, tired of introspection. "I found it, let's put her down."

The man meanders his way into the common space, rocking the baby in his arms. She's cooing gently, and he sways over to the tape deck, whacking the play button with one fist. 

“ _Oooo, you wait a long time for me_ ,” croons the grainy music, and Peter sings along. He spins and dips the baby on the way over to the playpen, prompting more loud, open vowel sounds that aren’t exactly crying, but aren’t terribly enjoyable, either.

Eventually, he finds the time to place her gently in the playpen between dance moves. She kicks and squirms, trying to unravel the blanket she’s wrapped in, until Gamora takes pity and unwraps her fully.

“Rocket,” she says, glancing at the once-white onesie on the child, “did we get any baby clothes in those many boxes?”

“I think so, but they’re all different sizes.”

“Can you look? This is honestly disturbing.” The amount of stains in itself would be terrible, but the massive variance in color and texture makes it a thing to be burned.

“Yeah, that’s why I kept the blanket on her.” Peter remarks, shimmying past.

There are times when Gamora is immensely grateful for Rocket’s company. He looks at her with what must be a mirror image of her own disgusted, disappointed expression. (Except smaller, and furrier.)

“Can you-” 

“I’m on it.” Rocket dives headfirst into one of the piles of stuffed animals.

Gamora sighs, trying to work the thing off of the baby without touching it at all. She, of course, thinks it a game, and coos and flails. Thinking quickly, she grabs the socks off the baby’s tiny hands, and then pulls the sleeves over, covering her nails as she immediately tries to grab- and scratch the hell out of- Gamora’s wrist.

“You are just as much trouble as your father,” she tells the baby.

“I must protest. She has not shot, stolen, or blown anything up yet.” Drax’s voice comes from the doorway. And while he is as metaphor-blind as ever, his friends’ antics seem to have inspired something of a dry irony in him over the years.

“Give her time!” Peter says, still dancing.

“I call first on teachin’ the little bag of poop how to handle a gun, by the way.” Rocket emerges from the pile of stuff with star-patterned pajamas in hand, and walks them over to Gamora.

“You have barely even looked at her, and yet you call first? Absolutely not.” Gamora declares. She slips the sleeves of the dark blue shirt over the baby’s pudgy arms, and then replaces the socks over her hands. She tries to get her hands to her mouth, presumably to get the things off, but cannot quite reach- though she comes close to punching herself in the chin.

Rocket puts a hand to his chest, offended. “Hey, who’s the best shot in here?”

“How da-a-are you!” Peter sings to the tune of the music. 

“Groot, help me with this.” Gamora says, while Peter and Rocket shout at each other with unnecessary dramatism.

He creaks as he sits cross-legged on the other side of the pile.

“Dig out the clothes and some soft toys. The rest go back in the box.” She grabs a patterned sundress, tiny but still too large for the baby, and starts a pile.

Groot finds a fluffy purple tentacled thing, as long as the baby is tall, and stretches his arm out to place it in atop the baby. She screams, delightedly, and smacks it in the face a few times before she stuffs as much of it as she can into her mouth.

Out of the corner of her eye, Gamora notices Peter twirling his way to the playpen. The music is still playing, but someone’s turned the volume down, and Rocket has retreated to his corner, tools in hand.

Peter reaches down, bopping the baby in the face with an errant purple tentacle. “Hey there,” he whispers. He leans over, grabbing her around the middle, and rolls her onto her stomach, her new friends’ furry appendages underneath her as a pillow. He rests a hand on the back of her pajamas, the sparkly fabric of the constellation design rasping against his fingers. “Hey there, stargirl.”

Gamora smiles and keeps sorting clothing, keeping an eye out for anything with stars on it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's... the end of the document. You are all now officially as caught up as I am, folks! I'll try to keep writing the thing, and I have pretty high hopes, but some shit's happening home-wise so, uh. Maybe don't be surprised if this stays quiet for a while.
> 
> I definitely want to write delighted grandpa Yondu into this, and moderately-pissed Auntie Nebula!

**Author's Note:**

> There's actually quite a bit more of this that I have written, but hopefully if I only post it a little at a time I can stay ahead of myself procrastination-wise. 
> 
> Weirdly enough I've had this sitting in my docs for a year and a half, I just felt like I needed to get to a stopping point before I posted it. Well, no longer! This will be a chaptered fic and I will finish the damn thing. (Lies.)


End file.
